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Shortcuts to an infant-like view on the world

By Shaoni Bhattacharya

Through the eyes of babes… (Image&colon; Paul Biris/Getty)

Catch a baby’s gaze. Can you imagine what it sees? We were all babies once, but none of us recall how the world appeared in those first few years of life. As our brains mature, our perceptual awareness changes. As the years go by, a gulf grows between our adult and infant minds. But new studies into the effect of psychoactive stimulants on consciousness suggest that there are ways for our adult brains to cross back.

What’s it like to be a baby? Alison Gopnik, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, offers the following analogies.

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Go to Paris, fall in love

(Image&colon; Mitch Diamond/Getty)

New experiences, such as visiting a new place or starting new relationships, can help focus our attention – something that’s thought to rely on the brain’s plasticity. Experiments in rats have shown that when they are trained to focus on either the frequency or intensity of sounds, some of their brain circuits restructure themselves, with certain neurons recruited to the tasks and others suppressed. Such a pliable, plastic brain is a fair approximation of what we see in babies. When we pay attention we effectively revert parts of our brain to their childhood state.

Coffee and cigarettes

(Image&colon; Martin Diebel/Getty)

Stimulants like caffeine and nicotine drive similar changes. Nicotine mimics a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine, which manages the activation of certain parts of the brain when we pay attention. At the same time, other inhibitory neurotransmitters would typically stop other parts of the brain from joining the party. But caffeine keeps these killjoy neurotransmitters at bay, making your brain more generally alert. A baby’s immature brain is more plastic overall, so being a baby may be like paying attention with more of your brain. Coffee and cigarettes nudge us in that direction.

Watch a good movie

If you want to experience what it’s like seeing the world through infant eyes, go and see a completely engrossing movie. Events on screen can remain vivid even as you relinquish a certain amount of conscious control over your awareness and sense of self.

Psychedelic stimulants

The effects of psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – on adult consciousness are even more extreme and may effectively revert key hubs in our brain to an infant-like state, at least temporarily. We appear to start life without a recognisable sense of self, developing self-awareness through social interactions.

Psychedelics like psilocybin also disrupt this sense of self, with people under the influence reporting the strange feeling that they were melting into everything around them. Brain scans show that the parts of the brain deactivated by the drug – those involved in self-awareness – are underdeveloped in babies. In a sense, psychedelics offer a window into what infantile consciousness might be like.